Low treason
Elizabeth WISKEMANN
Betrayal From Within James Barros (Yale UP 90s)
This is an indictment of Joseph Avenol, the French Secretary-General of the League of Nations from 1933 to 1940. Professor Barros feels that Avenol deliberately paralysed the League in the most critical years of its life. There can be little doubt that his sympathies were narrowly anti-Soviet and Catholic and inclined towards Fascist Italy. Thus he cer- tainly made his contribution towards the tragic fiasco of the League's behaviour dur- ing the conflict between Italy and Ethiopia, caused by Italy's aggression in 1935 and 1936.
He was one of the people who thought it important to try to keep Italy and Germany apart by somehow prolonging the Stresa front. But the Spanish civil war, which he fatally attempted to ignore, cemented the beginnings of the Axis alliance. Meanwhile, it is not uninteresting to find Avenol in 1937 writing to Blum, for instance, to say that although the Little Entente was dead it would be worth while to try to bring together a Central European bloc consisting of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria: as Mr Barros points out, the aims of such a bloc could only be to favour Hungarian rearmament and other things incompatible with the principles of the League of Na- tions.
When open war came at last, Avenol seemed increasingly to lose his head. More and more he was found to advocate the sur- render of the League to become Hitler's instrument in the refashioning of the Euro- pean order. The defeat of France seemed to blind him completely. In this last period he made his contribution to two affairs with long-term consequences. One was the ex- pulsion of Russia (then presiding over the Council) from the League, on account of the Soviet attack upon Finland. This meant that. at the end of the war, Russia would veto the resurrection of the League of Nations and agree only to the foundation of an organisa- tion new in name. the United Nations. The second thing, the emphasis placed upon the technical work of the League at the expense of its political activities, Mr Barros thinks affected the character of the United Nations more positively.
Although Mr Barros has read unused. material, he has been hampered by finding that many potentially valuable League documents were destroyed in the final crisis. His most precious new source is the diary of Avenol's successor, Sean Lester, and the let- ter he wrote to his son-in-law in 1958. (For the layman, F. P. Walters' History of the League of Nations will remain the essential textbook.) Lester becomes the hero as Avenol is the villain of Mr Barros's piece. This being so, the reader might have hoped for more about Lester's earlier career, his ad- mirable performance as League High Corn- missioner in Danzig, for instance. Is it possi- ble that this gallant Irishman, had he been Secretary-General in time, might have defeated the Zeitgeist of the 'thirties? If anyone could have done so it would have been Sean Lester.
Mr Barros's book is marred only by its lack of objectivity which is also perhaps its virtue. It is not quite fair to quote Beck on Poland's condemnation of Avenol without explaining that Beck was almost pathologically anti-French, and no friend of the League of Nations. As for Lester, anyone who knew him during the war years in Geneva must share Mr Barros's obvious enthusiasm.
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